1890.] on Evolution in Music. 67 



contemplating their yet living dinners, which resemble quarter tones, 

 to the strange intervals, exceeding a tone, which occur in many 

 highly-developed scales. The probability is that when we meet 

 with a scale containing an eccentric interval, this eccentric inter- 

 val is the original nucleus of the scale, to which other notes were 

 added as the instinct and general intelligence of the savages improved. 

 The sum of the process of scale-making amounts to this :— That first 

 a simple nucleus of two notes was formed, and by very slow degrees 

 other notes were added, till the whole range of sounds possible to the 

 human voice was mapped out. This, obviously, is the first example 

 of progress from the confused chaos of indefinite and unsystematised 

 sounds to the heterogeneity of perfectly established scales. When 

 the difficulties presented by the problem of contriving scales are 

 realised (as they may be by any one who studies the question a little), 

 it will be seen that the process must have been an enormously long 

 one, taxing the musical instinct of man for probably thousands of 

 years. As a matter of fact, scale-making, even in primary stages, was 

 going on vigorously till not much over a century ago, and in some 

 phases cannot be said to be by any means finished yet. Scales are 

 always liable to alteration, whenever the instinct of composers leads 

 them to divine an opportunity for expanding the material at their 

 command for artistic purposes; and whenever the instinct of a 

 number of musical beings ratifies the change as logical and artisti- 

 cally practical, it takes its place as an established fact. 



The next step to merely dividing off the possible range of sounds 

 into fixed relative positions, is to classify them into groups in which 

 special notes have special functions. The music of the ancient world 

 being all melodic, men's instincts impelled them to develop a scale 

 system which gave them best opportunities for melodic variety. 

 This naturally resulted in their having as many modes as possible ; 

 or, in other words, having as many varieties of relationship as they 

 could devise between the key-note or final and the other notes of the 

 scale. And they looked upon these various modes as having 

 particular qualities of feeling — one mode being sad, another gay, 

 another solemn, and so forth. 



The Greek system was, no doubt, a highly-developed one for 

 melodic purposes ; but whatever its traditions were, they did not have 

 much influence on our modern music, except through the actual dis- 

 tribution of the notes into modes. The Romans seem to have had 

 no instinct for music. Their energies were occupied in organising 

 the world as then known into a workable empire, and their leisure 

 was occupied with kinds of amusements which have a tendency to 

 destroy the taste for refined music. No two things seem more 

 poisonous to musical art than spectacles of brutal violence which 

 give people a taste for excessive excitement, and a luxurious life of 

 frivolity into which enters a strong element of vulgar display. The 

 decrepit condition of music in the early centuries of our era was 

 as much owing to the neglect of the art by the Romans as to the 



